CMO is a tough job, Theia will have your back
Marketing is a critical function in any commercial organisation, and one of the most exposed.
With more channels and competitors, prioritising the best actions is essential, and getting the right market data can prove decisive: this is why I created Theia.
I have been in your seat, responsible for building analytics and marketing science functions before managing 8 figures marketing budgets for household brands in the UK in the most competitive markets (travel, financial services, ...).
I developed Theia over the last 15 years, for my own needs as senior marketing executive. This helped me articulate, communicate and execute successful marketing strategies in every single of my jobs.
🎯 The Role of a CMO: Driving Profitable Growth Through Market Clarity
At its core, the job of a CMO is to do two things:
- Identify and prioritise the most profitable growth opportunities
- Spot threats early enough to adapt and outmaneuver them
That means constantly asking:
- Who are my key competitors?
- Where are they winning?
- What are the opportunities in the market, how big are they?
- What do we need to do to win in each category?
To do that well, you need more than performance dashboards or keyword lists.
You need a clear, dynamic picture of the market.
The first AhA moment came 15 years ago, when I realised that I could build a map of all the competitors, including all the queries customers use to visit any of those websites.
Theia is the only tool in the market which can provide you with a comprehensive market map (ALL competitors, ALL categories, ALL products).
It provides both strategic insights and visualisations to get the buy-in you need from the C-suite, as well as the details to implement winning marketing strategies.
With tight budgets, market research can be seen as an avoidable expense: Theia is very efficient and cost-effective and will deliver an immediate return on investment.
🔍 Search Is Where It All Starts
In nearly every senior marketing role I’ve held—from Lastminute.com to GoCompare to Canon—one thing became increasingly clear:
Search is the primary way customers express their needs.
And yet, it remained underused.
I have carried out a research on some 2,500 commercial websites, analysing their channel mix (source: SimilarWeb).
Search makes up over 65% of traffic for most websites, with the detail of each query bringing query being easily accessible to any marketeer.
If you exclude Direct, it means that more 90% of your new customers will find your website using Search: that should be a prime source of market research and insight.
Yet. search data was rarely used beyond keyword lists or SEO checklists.
It wasn’t driving real strategy. It wasn’t seen as a source of market intelligence.
That bothered me.
🧠 What If We Could Reverse Engineer Google?
Search engines already understand the market better than most marketing teams do.
They know:
- What users are searching
- Which pages best serve those queries
- How all those interactions group into business categories
So I started asking:
- Can we uncover the hidden structure behind search?
- Can we group queries not by volume—but by intent?
- Can we automatically map out the competitive landscape?
That became the foundation for Theia.
The Core Idea: Query–URL Equivalence
The second Aha moment came 7 years ago, when I wast trying to help the M&A team of my company to find and evaluate potential acquisition targets.
The idea was that a target should be close enough to GoCompare to develop business synergies, but not too close to grow the scope of services.
The intuition was that there should exist a "semantic" distance where similar companies would compete for similar queries. As most companies sell different services, we should be able to build a "map" of how close some services are from each other.
Here’s the insight that unlocked it all:
Google associates queries to URLs, meaning that similarl intent queries will likely be visible on the same URLs. The map below shows an example on related queries around pregnancy
Which means we can cluster queries automatically —not just by keyword similarity, but by behavioral outcome. Theia does this at scale, across thousands of queries and competitors.
📈 From Keywords to Strategic Insight
In one retail example, we started with a list of 100 terms around “coats.”
Theia expanded this to:
- 7,500+ queries
- 80+ subcategories
- New competitors previously outside our radar
But more importantly, it revealed: - Underdeveloped segments (Accessories, Jewelry, Gifts)
- Missed categories with high intent and low visibility
This wasn’t just SEO. It was market strategy.
🛒 Amazon Is a Discovery Engine Too
Theia doesn’t stop at Google.
Whilst you might think about Amazon as a retail channel, it is also one of the most important search engines for product.
What Theia has found is that searches are very similar in Amazon compared to Google: customers search in the way.
There is an interesting nuance though: the proportion of generic searches on Amazon is higher than Google for a same category.
Think:
“noise cancelling earbuds”
“office desk setup”
“kids stainless steel water bottle”
These aren’t just product searches—they're early-stage category exploration.
Amazon isn't just a conversion channel.
It's a powerful awareness engine for product discovery which is very often used very early in the purchase journey.
Amazon search engine is also a gigantic machine-learning engine which associates products to queries. As for Google, Theia uses the equivalence between queries and products to cluster both the products and queries.
Using Theia, manufacturers can:
Identify high-intent queries
Identify the key competitor product and their sales
Analyze price clusters and review thresholds
Estimate the share of voice, market share and market potential (in units and value)
Optimise their listing in the right segments by targeting the right terms and key customer questions.
🧠 From Internal Tool to Strategic Platform
I built Theia because I needed it.
Now, it’s used by:
Marketing teams seeking strategic clarity
Agencies delivering insight-led SEO and content
Investors assessing digital growth potential
Product companies scaling visibility on Amazon
If you want to turn messy search data into sharp market insight, Theia was built for you.